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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (152839)	1/23/2009 7:38:55 AM
From: SeachRE	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

>>first writings appeared 30-100 years later<< They didn't have Amazon.com then... ;-)

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (152839)	1/23/2009 12:03:04 PM
From: one_less	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

How do writings 'appear'? Did they use disappearing/reappearing ink back then, did you mean they were publicized, or did you mean they were authored at that time? And if so how would you know that other people were not authoring commentary on Jesus. I saw your mention of all the scholars but I don't see a specific reference that qualifies this statement of yours. That would need to be at least someone expert in the period of ancient Jerusalem covering the Herodian dynasty.

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (152839)	1/23/2009 1:26:42 PM
From: Brumar89	2 Recommendations Respond to of 173976

"First writings appeared 30-100 years later" - more like 20-30 years in the case of the earliest epistles. 30 years + for the gospels. First, that isn't very long. Plenty of eyewitnesses would still have been alive to use as sources. Second, as the movement or church spread geographically, there was need for written communications ie. letters between the members, so the earliest documents are such letters. Third, it makes sense that as contemporaneous eyewitnesses started dying off, people would feel a need to start the process of getting things on paper for when they wouldn't be around, thus the writing of the Gospels. So logically, you'd expect to see writings start showing up after a few decades as they did. BTW re. miracles, the earliest of Paul's letters do proclaim that Jesus rose from the dead, certainly the greatest and most significant of all miracles. Furthermore re. that resurrection, I quoted earlier a passage from one of Paul's letters listing people to whom the risen Jesus appeared. Whether you believe in the resurrection yourself, this is a historical source relating a little over 20 years after the fact that there were hundreds of people still living who claimed to be eyewitnesses of a living Jesus after his resurrection. Perhaps you can believe they were all hallucinating or conspiring in some massive con. But that hundreds of such testifiers existed is thus well established. And not simply by the Paul's listing of them, but also by the product of their work. That there were churches scattered over the eastern Mediterranean (in Rome, Greece, what is now Turkey, Syria, Israel) for Paul to write letters to after only 20 years is because the witnesses were transformed and galvanized by their experience and spread the word of that. The rapid growth of Jesus' movement from a small group of dispirited followers of an executed man to a religious group with churches scattered all over the Mediterranean in just a couple decades indicates that something very dramatic changed and transformed them.